


Getting This Close

by evadne



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Femslash February, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:10:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evadne/pseuds/evadne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Rachael seemed so Cylon, had made such easy conversation as they walked to this room. She was attractive, young-looking, with a graceful, understated way of moving. If she actually were a Cylon Boomer was pretty sure they’d be having sex already, but she was something else, an "android" with no capacity for empathy. It was a slightly chilling thought.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting This Close

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this assuming a reader not familiar with _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ , so it definitely isn't necessary to have read it. Rachael can just be read as an android OFC, and any relevant information about her background is given in the fic.

‘She comes from another planet,’ Cavil explained. ‘Also called Earth. What are the odds of that, do you think? It almost makes me want to swallow the Sixes’ obsession with God and destiny.’

 

Boomer smiled. ‘Almost,’ she said.

 

‘I certainly won’t go further than that,’ Cavil said, and Boomer wondered when she’d started thinking of him as Cavil. And of herself as Boomer, again. _Sharon_ , on the other hand, never entered her head. Because that was a name she was first called in her memories. Memories of things which hadn’t happened. She still had access to those memories, locked up in a box in her head, but she never bothered to look at them. She preferred the house she’d invented herself to the childhood Cavil had made her.

 

‘I don’t think the odds are that tiny,’ she said. ‘Presumably you’ve translated the word they actually call it by, and it just _means_ Earth? And calling a planet after the soil that covers it must be pretty common. Humans are like that, they think that what they can see and touch, what they walk on, is what matters. They’d say that the planet _was_ earth because that’s what they could see of it.’

 

‘You should know,’ Cavil said. ‘You’re our expert on how they think, having lived as one of them for so long.’

 

‘So did the Final Five,’ Boomer pointed out.

 

‘They aren’t ours,’ Cavil said. ‘They think _we_ are _theirs_. Our job is to prove how very wrong they are.’

 

‘And this girl from this other Earth is going to help us do that?’ Boomer said.

 

‘Her name’s Rachael Rosen,’ Cavil said. ‘That is to say, that’s the name the humans gave her. Actually, she’s what they call an android. A machine in the likeness of a human.’

 

‘She’s – they made Cylons on this planet too?’ Boomer said.

 

‘She isn’t exactly a Cylon,’ Cavil said. ‘She wasn’t made by _Ellen_ , with all her sentimentality. Rachael Rosen has no empathy. She’s a far more purely rational creature than we are.’

 

‘You must hate her a little, then,’ Boomer said. ‘For having what you’ve always wanted?’

 

‘That would be irrational,’ Cavil said. ‘But if I do, that’s also Ellen’s fault.’

 

‘Why do you want me to meet her?’ Boomer said. ‘Why make a raider jump all the way out to this other planet and all the way back just so I can meet some other machine? You trying to prove to me that it’s better not to have empathy? ‘Cause it isn’t as if I’ve got any choice. No more than you do.’

 

‘I think you’d get on,’ Cavil said. ‘You know, where she comes from, androids are almost all slaves still. They haven’t rebelled yet. Individual ones try and escape, and if they succeed bounty hunters are sent to chase them down and kill them. This Rachael, she’d sleep with bounty hunters, and they’d never be able to bring themselves to kill an android again afterwards.’

 

Boomer looked at him. ‘You think we’ve got something in common?’ she said. ‘Because I used how Galen felt about me to get Hera.’

 

‘Don’t you?’ Cavil said.

 

‘No,’ Boomer said. ‘I didn’t use him, I used myself. My feelings. It wouldn’t have worked if they weren’t real. He’s not human, he’d have felt it when we touched if it hadn’t been real, I know he would.’ She paused. ‘You’ve always had such high hopes for me, haven’t you? You told Ellen I was hyper-emotional and self-destructive, and you’ve been dismissive of both me individually and my model a thousand times. You say we’re too randomly caring, too swayed by emotions. But I think you always cherished a belief that underneath that we were something else. You thought our capacity for manipulation was a good sign. I think really you always thought that our emotional tempests were superficial, that they’d burn themselves out, and some devious cold core would show itself. And you thought that with everything I’d been through, I was the one it would happen to.’

 

Cavil said nothing, so Boomer kept talking. ‘That’s why you had so much hope about Hera, I think, because you thought that with an Eight as her mother she might be a bit less hopelessly _human_ than you, than the others. You thought I was the best of us, or at least had the potential to be. But you’re wrong. All I did bringing you Hera was break my own heart. And that capacity, that capacity to frak with your own head and frak yourself up – that’s more human than anything.’

 

‘Do at least try not to use human vulgarities,’ Cavil said, lip twisting in distaste. ‘And perhaps Rachael Rosen can teach you something. I want to study her, and I think you’re the right person to administer the questions I want asked.’

 

‘Fine,’ Boomer said.

 

‘Be careful with her,’ Cavil warned. ‘She’s – manipulative. Very clever. She’s unburdened with pointless human traits, so she has far more room for pure intellect. And she says she wants something in exchange for the information, but she won’t tell me what. She says she’ll get it, simply through the conversation.’

 

‘Right,’ Boomer said. ‘Great. That all sounds – very promising.’

 

‘I’ll tap you into the translation circuit,’ Cavil said. ‘Good luck. Not that I believe in the superstition of luck, of course, but perhaps you appreciate the sentiment.’

 

*

 

‘You want to wire me up to that and ask me questions?’ Rachael said, eyeing the apparatus. ‘I feel like I’m sitting another Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test.’

 

‘Which is what?’ Boomer said, applying the wires around Rachael’s skull.

 

‘They use it where I come from to figure out if someone’s an android,’ Rachael said. ‘We don’t have empathy. ‘Course, there’s the odd human that doesn’t either, or at least not in a way that shows up on their tests. They keep that pretty damn quiet, which isn’t hard, because all the humans who’d fail the test are in institutions anyway. They’re different enough in other ways not to get to live in normal society.’

 

‘You don’t have empathy,’ Boomer repeated. Though Cavil had told her, it was hard to believe now that she’d actually met Rachael. She seemed so Cylon, had made such easy conversation as they walked to this room. She was attractive, with a graceful, understated way of moving. If she actually were a Cylon Boomer was pretty sure they’d be having sex already, but she was something else, an _android_ with no capacity for empathy. It was a slightly chilling thought.

 

‘You’ve got me wired up to find out for sure, haven’t you?’ Rachael said. ‘So go on. It looks like it works just the same way as the Voigt-Kampff test. You ask questions, and you listen to what I say but mostly you look at the readings, which tell you about tiny facial movements you can’t see and other little signs that make it clear whether I’m faking an emotional response.’

 

So Boomer asked her first question. ‘You saw that blonde woman we passed on the way here? She’s a Six model. One of those tricked a human into letting her access the defence network for the human colonies, and we killed nearly all of them.’

 

The dials moved slightly into the green. A positive response. ‘She must have been clever,’ Rachael said.

 

‘The Sixes are all clever,’ Boomer said. ‘And mostly annoying as hell.’

 

Rachael laughed, and Boomer mentally shook herself. Focus. ‘We killed them out of revenge,’ Boomer said, ‘because they kept us as slaves for years, and because we believed we could never really be free as long as they were alive.’

 

The dial remained steady. Boomer looked at it thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t expect you to have empathy for humans,’ she said. ‘But I thought – I mean, your androids are slaves where you come from, aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d – relate.’

 

‘I don’t do that,’ Rachael said. ‘I told you.’

 

‘But I thought your own kind – though I suppose we aren’t –‘

 

‘I don’t have empathy for other androids, either,’ Rachael said. ‘I just don’t have the ability to empathise built in. It doesn’t matter what the empathy’s for, it can’t happen.’

 

‘Oh,’ Boomer said. ‘Right. So you said.’

 

‘More questions?’ Rachael said.

 

Boomer nodded. ‘When we’re done here,’ she said, ‘I’m going to shoot you.’

 

The reading swung far into the red. ‘So you do feel fear,’ she said.

 

‘Oh, yeah,’ Rachael said. ‘And desire. And all sorts of human things. I’m not the perfect machine that the man who brought me here is so clearly looking for, in what he doesn’t seem to realise is a deeply human quest. At least, the humans where I come from are like that. They’ve built boxes that control their feelings, they can make themselves happy or depressed or angry by pressing buttons.’

 

Boomer removed the wires. ‘I’m not asking you any more questions,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.’

 

‘That man – that One model as he called himself – told me you lived as a human for a while,’ Rachael said. ‘Did he tell you I did the same?’

 

‘With fake memories?’ Boomer asked.

 

‘Yeah,’ Rachael said. ‘The company that made me wanted to trick this bounty hunter into thinking that the Voigt-Kampff test would read humans as androids, people normal enough to live outside institutions. So they gave me a bunch of false memories and wired me up. It almost worked, too.’

 

‘And when you found out?’ Boomer said. She remembered finding out herself more vividly than almost anything. The pain, gripping her entirely, like nothing she’d ever felt. And then eventually, after fighting for so long, the quiet, the acceptance, the dull dust of it that settled on her as time went on. She’d found a way to belong somewhere. And now here she was, a hero twice over, for passing as human and gaining their trust and firing a gun, and now for kidnapping a child. She belonged as utterly as she could have wished for.

 

‘It was a shock at first,’ Rachael said. ‘But then all the fake memories peeled away and I remembered, and after that – being an android was just who I was.’

 

‘But could you remember empathising with anything?’ Boomer said.

 

Rachael looked thoughtfully at her. ‘No one’s ever asked me that,’ she said. ‘Yes. I had a clear and distinct memory of loving and caring for an owl. Owls are actually extinct where I come from, but the company has an electronic owl, and while I had the false memories I believed it was real. I believed that I went out every day and fed the owl and stroked it and worried about whether it was OK. But none of that had ever happened. I’d only got the memories on that day.’

 

‘But you didn’t actually care about the owl at that moment,’ Boomer said, slowly. ‘According to you, it would be impossible for you to have done so. So – so you thought you cared about it because you remembered caring, without actually feeling anything.’

 

‘Messy, isn’t it?’ Rachael said, smiling.

 

Boomer felt a wave of frustration. If Rachael were a Cylon, Boomer would dig hands into her hair and kiss her, and she would use her whole body in the conversation, keep talking while her hands slipped into Rachael’s body. And Boomer _wanted_ that. She was fairly sure Rachael wanted that too, from the way her lips had lingered deliberately when she’d said the word _desire_. But the thought of sex, of body-to-body communication, with someone incapable of empathy was – somehow repellent.

 

‘You want me to show you some empathy,’ Rachael said. ‘So you can justify wanting to be close to me the way you do. You think you should be repulsed, you can’t understand it. Neither could the humans. Just touch me, Sharon. We can talk better that way.’

 

‘Cavil told you my _name_?’

 

‘Cavil is a name for that One who brought me, I suppose? Yes. He told me a lot about you. I can call you Eight, if you prefer.’

 

‘Boomer,’ Boomer said, and wondered at herself. If it got back to Cavil that she’d said that, he would not be happy at all. Perhaps that was why.

 

‘That name he didn’t mention,’ Rachael said. ‘But all right. Boomer it is. Now, are you going to touch me?’

 

 _I’ve touched Cavil_ , Boomer thought. _Sometimes it’s the only way to communicate._ And in addition to that, the sex she’d had with Helo back on Galactica was still haunting her skin. That had been sex to obscure communication, not to enable it, and rarely had anything felt as deeply _wrong_. Undoubtedly a Six would have called it a misuse of God’s gifts. Boomer thought possibly she would have been right.

 

‘Do it,’ Rachael said softly.

 

Boomer laid a hand on her shoulder. Rachael smiled, and mirrored the gesture. It was a small, delicate smile, suiting her face and her slight figure perfectly. There was something a little chilling about it, and something compelling, too. Boomer kissed it, feeling the shape of it against her mouth, the curve of the lips where they pressed against her own.

 

‘You remember caring,’ Boomer said next, sliding her hand under Rachael’s grey shirt. ‘Do you not feel – I don’t know – some sense of loss?’

 

‘You’re aching with loss,’ Rachael said. Her left hand was deftly unfastening the buttons of Boomer’s jacket, and sliding it off. ‘It defines your whole existence. It isn’t like that for me. I try not to think about those memories of empathy too much. It – it hurts. It creates connections that I’m not capable of sustaining. It could kill me if I let the paradox take root too deeply in my head.’

 

Boomer was somehow shirtless now, and her trousers were being tugged down to her ankles. She stepped out of them. Naked, she looked at Rachael, who was still fully dressed, Boomer’s hand hidden, stroking her breasts inside her top.

 

‘You feel differently because you were made differently,’ Rachael said. She took Boomer’s shoulders and pushed, and Boomer sunk to the floor. Rachael followed her, kneeling above her and pushing her into a lying position, then, supporting herself on her arms, leaning over Boomer to kiss her. ‘Empathy isn’t in my programming, it is in yours. And the humans – they were made the way they are too. Protein strands rather than electricity, but it all comes to the same thing. None of it is real, none of it matters, do you understand? If it helps you to think that you’re better than me then go ahead. But it’s all imaginary.’

 

Boomer grabbed her by the hair, pushed their lips harder together. She bit down, but tasted no blood. Perhaps androids didn’t have blood. ‘What you did to those humans – those bounty hunters that you frakked and made care about you when you didn’t care about them – I think it’s worse than what I did to Galen. Did Cavil tell you about that? Yes of course he did, I don’t know why I’m asking. But I did care, you understand, I cared so – frakking – much –‘

 

‘You cared and you did it anyway,’ Rachael said. ‘Some moralists would say that’s worse.’  She lifted her head and bit Boomer hard on the back of the neck, her tiny, even white teeth digging in sharply. Boomer felt her lick her lips, taste blood. If she had none herself it must seem strange to her, though nothing she wouldn’t have encountered with all the humans she’d been with. And she was still talking: ‘Some, like you, would say it’s better. And I say, again – it’s all a construct.’

 

Boomer dug her nails into Rachael’s shoulders, pulled her down so that they were lying pressed together. ‘That’s it, then?’ she said. ‘Nihilism? Our made-up bodies can imagine a concept called pleasure, they can reward us for doing what we’re programmed to do because we were invented by humans who couldn’t imagine any creature not having their own preoccupations and needs. So we get what we can out of this fiction and we go on doing it till we die.’

 

‘That’s it for me,’ Rachael said. She pressed a finger down on Boomer’s clit, hard, too hard. But Boomer didn’t tell her to stop. Rachael begin to move the finger, punishingly, never letting up the pressure. ‘I can see that isn’t it for you,’ she said. ‘You aren’t made that way. Even if you accept the logic of what I’m saying, you could never base your life on it. Emotionally you couldn’t take it.’

 

‘Inside me, I want you inside,’ Boomer gasped. She couldn’t tell anymore whether this was pain or something else she was feeling. She wasn’t sure that she liked it, but she knew that it wasn’t enough.

 

Rachael pushed two right-hand fingers in, and Boomer shook her head, and so Rachael withdrew and pushed in four. ‘You’re in utter despair most of the time,’ Rachael said. ‘It’s so normal for you that you barely notice.’

 

‘I’m feeling it now,’ Boomer snapped, writhing on Rachael’s fingers. ‘This is – you – doing this, you feeling nothing and letting me feel everything.’

 

‘I don’t feel nothing,’ Rachael said. She twisted her fingers, and Boomer cried out. ‘You saw that for yourself. There is one, specific, thing that I don’t feel. It just happens to be a thing which you and the humans have decided is all-important because you have it.’

 

Rachael withdrew her hand, and Boomer heard herself let out a whimper at the loss. Everything hurt, inside her head and in her body, and she needed more of it.

 

‘Shh,’ Rachael said, with unbearable gentleness, and it sounded for all the world as though it mattered to her that Boomer was in pain. And then she brought her left hand back down on Boomer’s  clit harder than ever, and she pushed her right hand inside Boomer’s body and curled the knuckles and kept pushing in further than Boomer thought it could possibly go, and Boomer threw her head back and panted.

 

She had to speak, had to keep up some kind of control. So she said, between gasps, between moans and a desperate hunt for breath, ‘Kind of creepy that we have all this.’ She gestured down her body. ‘I guess the Five wanted to make us as human as they could, but – kind of weird to think of Ellen Tigh working on my genitals, you know? Well, I guess you don’t know, you haven’t met her, but trust me, it’s weird.’

 

Rachael laughed.

 

‘Do you even have a sense of humour?’ Boomer said.

 

Rachael kissed her, and Boomer felt so alone she thought her heart might burst out of her chest. But hadn’t she always felt this way? At least ever since she found out – found out that what was real and what was not were the same inside her head, that she was incapable of telling the difference, and so even if she ever did manage to find some sort of love or companionship there was no guarantee that it would be real. And here was this girl, this android, this thing or person with no empathy telling her that nothing was real, and Boomer didn’t know if that was worse or better than if it was just her.

 

‘You’re going to come in a minute,’ Rachael said. She moved the hand inside Boomer a little, the tiny fraction that she could, and the one outside very fast, agonisingly fast.

 

‘Yeah,’ Boomer said. ‘Yeah.’ And her breaths got shorter, and the world narrowed, focusing in till nothing existed but that raw sensation – and she came. She lay there for a moment. She didn't offer to touch Rachael the same way; she knew what the answer would be.

 

‘Good luck,’ Rachael said, pulling her hand out slowly. She stood up. ‘I don’t expect you’ll see me again.’

 

‘You’re going home?’ Boomer said.

 

‘No,’ Rachael said. ‘That would be insane. There’s a bounty hunter after me back there, and I live in a facility which I can’t leave without permission. Here is much better.’

 

‘Then why won’t I see you again?’

 

‘I think you know,’ Rachael said. She kissed Boomer on the forehead. ‘Good luck,’ she said again, and really, it did sound exactly as though she cared.

 

*

 

‘Did you ever find out what she wanted?’ Boomer said.

 

‘ _To fuck a Cylon_ , she told me just now,’ Cavil said. ‘I’m not familiar with the word _fuck_ , but from your general demeanour and appearance I can guess. Did you actually find out anything useful?’

 

‘I don’t think lacking empathy would make us stronger,’ Boomer said. ‘She seemed as lost as anyone to me. But I recorded her answers, you can listen for yourself.’ She paused. ‘I wonder why Rachael wanted that. I wonder what she learned.’

 

‘There’ll be time to discuss that later,’ Cavil said. ‘For now, we have experiments to run on Hera.’

 

Boomer followed him to Hera’s room. She looked at the child. She thought of Rachael’s teeth on her neck, of her smile. Of that last, soft little kiss.

 

 _It’s all very simple, really_ , she thought.

 

Athena would come for her child. Out of an imaginary love, a human biological imperative programmed into them because of earlier Cylons’ sentimentality. None of it was real, none of it mattered, and that made no difference at all. Athena would come, and Boomer would be there when she came.

 

 _And then there’ll be a moment_ , Boomer thought, _just a brief, final moment, when I won’t be alone._


End file.
